Google Cloud Developer Plugin: Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity

Google released the google-cloud-developer plugin on September 10 from its official google/skills repository, adding Google Cloud authentication, gcloud guardrails, live documentation grounding, and project onboarding to Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity CLI via a single install command. The plugin bundles five skills, including Developer Knowledge Retrieval, which connects agents to Google's Developer Knowledge MCP server for real-time access to official Firebase, Cloud, Android, and Maps Platform documentation. The MCP server transport currently fails in Claude Code — documented as Issue #223 in the google/skills repo — because Claude Code lacks the authProviderType: google_credentials config option that Antigravity and Gemini CLI support, though a curl fallback preserves documentation retrieval.

Google released a plugin on September 10 that drops Google Cloud authentication, gcloud guardrails, live documentation grounding, and project onboarding into Claude Code, Codex, and Antigravity CLI — from a single install command. If you build on GCP and use any of those three tools, you’re one command away from an agent that actually knows how to talk to Google Cloud. What’s in the Plugin The google-cloud-developer plugin ships from Google’s official google/skills repository https://github.com/google/skills , the same Apache-2.0 repo Google announced at Cloud Next 2026. It bundles five skills: - Google Skill Discovery — surfaces other relevant Google skills your agent can load - gcloud Guidance — CLI guardrails and command suggestions to stop your agent from issuing destructive operations blindly - Authentication — manages gcloud auth login , credential flow, and project-level authorization - First-project Onboarding — walks new developers through creating or selecting a GCP project - Developer Knowledge Retrieval — connects to Google’s Developer Knowledge MCP server That last skill is the meaningful one. Most AI coding agents answer GCP questions from training data that’s months old. The Developer Knowledge MCP server https://developers.google.com/knowledge/mcp gives your agent real-time access to official Google documentation across Firebase, Cloud, Android, and Maps Platform. The agent stops guessing and starts reading the actual docs. The Catch: MCP Auth Is Broken in Claude Code Worth knowing before you install: the MCP server transport currently doesn’t work in Claude Code. Issue 223 in the google/skills repo https://github.com/google/skills/issues/223 documents it — the server accepts the MCP handshake but rejects every tools/call with an auth error because Claude Code has no equivalent of the authProviderType: google credentials config option that Antigravity and Gemini CLI support. The curl fallback still works, so you don’t lose documentation retrieval entirely — you just don’t get it through the MCP transport. It’s an inconvenience, not a dealbreaker. The bug is open and visible; a fix will land. The other four skills work fine regardless. How to Install It Claude Code: claude plugin marketplace add google/skills claude plugin install google-cloud-developer@google-plugins Antigravity CLI: agy plugin install https://github.com/google/skills/plugins/cloud/google-cloud-developer Codex CLI: No install needed. Codex discovers .agents/skills/ directories natively and reads AGENTS.md as its always-on adapter — the skills are picked up automatically once the files are present. There’s More in the Repo The google-cloud-developer plugin is the flagship, but the google/skills repo https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/level-up-your-agents-announcing-googles-official-skills-repository covers considerably more ground. BigQuery, GKE, Cloud Run, Firebase, AlloyDB, Cloud SQL — each with dedicated skills targeting common developer workflows. Google Workspace is there too: Gmail, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Calendar, Chat. All plain Markdown, all Apache-2.0, all forkable. AI coding agent ecosystems are building plugin infrastructures that are starting to function like package managers. Google shipping an official, cross-agent skills repo — compatible with Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, and Cursor — is a signal that this layer of the stack is hardening. The agents already have the horsepower. The question now is what knowledge you bolt onto them. Worth Installing If you touch GCP in any capacity and use one of the three supported agents, install it. The gcloud guardrails alone are worth it — agents confidently issuing destructive cloud commands without guardrails is a real problem, and this addresses it. The live documentation grounding is the ceiling raiser; once the Claude Code MCP auth issue is resolved, that becomes significantly more useful. The install takes under a minute. The official announcement is on the Google Cloud Blog https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/developers-practitioners/introducing-the-google-cloud-developer-plugin-for-ai-coding-agents .